Please go to www.twintowersalliance for ongoing news of this struggle. All of our energy is being directed there, but we will continue to host this website because it offers a unique perspective on this historic effort.

Summer 2006

Because People Want Their Towers Back

Hanging By A Thread

Just Another City?

"City of the World! (For all races are here, all the lands of the earth make contributions here.)
City of the Sea! City of wharves and stores – city of tall facades of marble and iron!
Proud and passionate city – mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!"

- Walt Whitman

New Yorkers and tourists alike used the Twin Towers as literal landmarks – to help them get their bearings. And for people around the world they epitomized the brash, exuberant spirit of New York.

So, it is striking that the current design for the ho-hum "Freedom Tower" would effectively turn downtown New York into a Boston, or a Savannah, or a Providence – attractive boutique cities, sedate and oh-so seemly – leaving us to wonder where, in fact, we are.

The Twin Towers were immodest proof of New York's extravagant spirit and if our response to their destruction is to replace them with the current slick, derivative design, then our city will be trivialized in the process – it may seem like New York, but it won't really be New York.

If what we finally put up at Ground Zero is not at least as majestic as what the terrorists took down, then it will probably be just be a matter of time before the blight of diminished expectations creeps northward and turns a once peerless city into a common place.

If we substitute the insipid, lowest-common-denominator building now on the drawing board for those legendary towers, then New York will take on a theme-park character. The Empire State Building, and the Chrysler Building, and the Statue of Liberty will still be here, but the spirit will have vanished.

It is time to stop playing politics with Ground Zero. It is time to determine what it is the people really want to see there, to stop trying to salvage the mess made by special interests in our name – and then to break records making it happen.

After all, this is the place where many of the construction workers who cleared away the vast mountain of debris expressed a desire to work without pay, if only they could help to rebuild the Towers!

No, this is not just another city.

Fall 2005

Taking Back the Memorial – Two Sides of the Same Coin

When the American people rejected the blame-America-first International Freedom Center at Ground Zero we saw how responsive politicians can become. This leads us to ask: "What took so long?" More

Summer 2005

Doing the right thing is the best tool we have for making progress in this world.

When Donald Trump took his courageous stand in support
of rebuilding the Twin Towers, he breathed new life into the hopes
most Americans still have of seeing the Twin Towers restored. More

"Dreams come true; without
that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."

- John Updike

Replacing the Twin Towers with a mediocre building, better-suited to Midtown or Jersey City, is not a legacy worthy of who we are as a people.

- Fall 2005

Future generations will see the Twin Towers as mythic: either because they once stood tall, were destroyed by blind hatred, and were then forsaken by a timid people; or because they will be standing tall, having been destroyed by blind hatred and then restored by a heroic nation.

- Fall 2005

The design competition was clearly hijacked by the elitist element that George Orwell had in mind when he famously said "only an intellectual could be that stupid."